We did it because the public’s right to know is fundamental to a free people.

That right is important enough to be included in the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Constitution protects public's right to know

The founders of this country knew that information is power.

When government controls the flow of information, people can lose their freedoms to an authoritarian regime.

The Arizona Constitution also protects the public’s right to be informed by a free press.

We live in interesting times. The president has called the press an “enemy of the people,” something Arizona Republican Sen. Jeff Flake decried in a speech on the floor of the Senate earlier this month.

Flake said: “The free press is the despot’s enemy, which makes the free press the guardian of democracy.”

A murder trial that put press freedom to test

The First Amendment protects the free press.

That brings us back to your victory.

Last year, The Republic was joined by the Associated Press, 12 News and Channels 3 and 5 in challenging a Maricopa County Superior Court judge who ordered reporters not to use the name or image of a prosecutor in a high-profile murder trial.

John Allen was on trial in the 2011 torture death of his wife’s cousin, Ame Deal, a 10-year-old child who was abused and then shut up in a small box and left to die on a hot July night.

Her death and what we learned about her short, painful life touched people. They wanted to know the details of her abusers’ trials. The press was there to tell them.

Media ordered to withhold prosecutor's name

Prosecutor Jeannette Gallagher, who won that conviction, was also seeking death for John Allen.

But Gallagher was simultaneously involved in a separate trial as the victim of a man who was subsequently convicted of stalking her.

To avoid influencing the jury in the stalking trial, Judge Erin Otis, who was presiding over the John Allen trial, ordered the media not to mention Gallagher, even though her identity had been widely reported during the Sammantha Allen trial.